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Former MSNBC host Joy Reid took issue with a popular Christmas carol, reposting a video that describes the beloved tune as racist. The now-viral clip has renewed scrutiny of the carol’s past, as the academic whose research the video is based on says that wasn’t her intent.
In the video, a man in festive attire stares at a plaque in Medford, Massachusetts, where James Lord Pierpont is believed to have written what became known as “Jingle Bells.”
The video makes the argument that the song’s early performances were used to “mock” Black people. It goes on to discuss Pierpont’s history using racialized dialect and slurs in other works. The clip also notes that the writer later fought for the Confederate Army in defense of slavery.
“This is where a racist Confederate soldier wrote ‘Jingle Bells’ to make fun of Black people,” reads the first caption on screen.
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The video says that Pierpont was strapped for cash and wrote the original version, “The One Horse Open Sleigh,” for performances where White actors in blackface caricatured Black people “trying to participate in winter activities.”
Reid, who lost her MSNBC show “The ReidOut” earlier this year, reposted the clip to her 1.3 million Instagram followers, writing, “Lord have mercy.” The video cites a 2017 Cambridge University Press paper titled “The Story I Must Tell: ‘Jingle Bells’ in the Minstrel Repertoire.”
“The legacy of ‘Jingle Bells’ is, as we shall see, a prime example of a common misreading of much popular music from the nineteenth century,” writes author Kyna Hamill in the study.
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“Its blackface and racist origins have been subtly and systematically removed from its history,” she added.
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However, Hamill has repeatedly said her work is being misrepresented and that she never claimed “Jingle Bells” was written as racist mockery. She maintains her research focuses on the performance history of the song and where it originated, not on Pierpont’s intent in composing it.
“I never said it was racist now,” Hamill told the Boston Herald in 2017, adding that she was not looking to dictate what songs are sung at Christmas.
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